````“Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
```And every warbler had his tune by heart.”=
Alfieri speaks with similar scorn of the tragedies of his predecessors.
“Mi cadevano dalle mani per la languidezza, trivialita e prolissita dei
modi e dei verso, senza parlare poi della snervatezza dei pensieri. Or
perche mai questa nostra divina lingua, si maschia anco, ed energica, e
feroce, in bocca di Dante, dovra ella farsi casi sbiadata ed eunuca nel
dialogo tragico?”
To men thus sick of the languid manner of their contemporaries
ruggedness seemed a venial fault, or rather a positive merit. In their
hatred of meretricious ornament, and of what Cowper calls “creamy
smoothness,” they erred on the opposite side. Their style was too
austere, their versification too harsh. It is not easy, however, to
overrate the service which they rendered to literature. The intrinsic
value of their poems is considerable. But the example which they set
of mutiny against an absurd system was invaluable. The part which they
performed was rather that of Moses than that of Joshua. They opened the
house of bondage; but they did not enter the promised land.
During the twenty years which followed the death of Cowper, the
revolution in English poetry was fully consummated. None of the writers
of this period, not even Sir Walter Scott, contributed so much to
the consummation as Lord Byron. Yet Lord Byron contributed to it
unwillingly, and with constant self-reproach and shame. All his tastes
and inclinations led him to take part with the school of poetry which
was going out against the school which was coming in. Of Pope himself
he spoke with extravagant admiration. He did not venture directly to say
that the little man of Twickenham was a greater poet than Shakspeare
or Milton; but he hinted pretty clearly that he thought so. Of his
contemporaries, scarcely any had so much of his admiration as Mr.
Gifford, who, considered as a poet, was merely Pope, without Pope’s
wit and fancy, and whose satires are decidedly inferior in vigour and
poignancy to the very imperfect juvenile performance of Lord Byron
himself. He now and then praised Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge, but
ungraciously and without cordiality. When he attacked them, he brought
his whole soul to the work. Of the most elaborate of Mr. Wordsworth’s
poems he could find nothing to say, but that it was “clumsy, and frowsy,
and his aversion.” Peter Bell excited his spleen to such a degree that
he evoked the shades of Pope and Dryden, and demanded of them whether
it were possible that such trash could evade contempt? In his heart
he thought his own Pilgrimage of Harold inferior to his Imitation of
Horace’s Art of Poetry, a feeble echo of Pope and Johnson. This insipid
performance he repeatedly designed to publish, and was withheld only
by the solicitations of his friends. He has distinctly declared his
approbation of the unities, the most absurd laws by which genius was
ever held in servitude. In one of his works, we think in his letter
to Mr. Bowles, he compares the poetry of the eighteenth century to the
Parthenon, and that of the nineteenth to a Turkish mosque, and boasts
that, though he had assisted his contemporaries in building their
grotesque and barbarous edifice, he had never joined them in defacing
the remains of a chaster and more graceful architecture. In another
letter he compares the change which had recently passed on English
poetry to the decay of Latin poetry after the Augustan age. In the
time of Pope, he tells his friend, it was all Horace with us. It is all
Claudian now.
For the great old masters of the art he had no very enthusiastic
veneration. In his letter to Mr. Bowles he uses expressions which
clearly indicate that he preferred Pope’s Iliad to the original.
Mr. Moore confesses that his friend was no very fervent admirer of
Shakspeare. Of all the poets of the first class Lord Byron seems to have
admired Dante and Milton most. Yet in the fourth canto of Childe Harold,
he places Tasso, a writer not merely inferior to them, but of quite a
different order of mind, on at least a footing of equality with them.
Mr. Hunt is, we suspect, quite correct in saying that Lord Byron could
see little or no merit in Spenser.
But Byron the critic and Byron the poet were two very different men. The
effects of the noble writer’s theory may indeed often be traced in his
practice. But his disposition led him to accommodate himself to the
literary taste of the age in which he lived; and his talents would have
enabled him to accommodate himself to the taste of any age. Though he
said much of his contempt for mankind, and though he boasted that amidst
the inconstancy of fortune and of fame he was all-sufficient to himself,
his literary career indicated nothing of that lonely and unsocial pride
which he affected. We cannot conceive him, like Milton or Wordsworth,
defying the criticism of his contemporaries, retorting their scorn, and
labouring on a poem in the full assurance that it would be unpopular,
and in the full assurance that it would be immortal. He has said, by the
mouth of one of his heroes, in speaking of political greatness, that “he
must serve who fain would sway”; and this he assigns as a reason for not
entering into political life. He did not consider that the sway which
he had exercised in literature had been purchased by servitude, by the
sacrifice of his own taste to the taste of the public.
He was the creature of his age; and whenever he had lived he would have
been the creature of his age. Under Charles the First Byron would have
been more quaint than Donne. Under Charles the Second the rants of
Byron’s rhyming plays would have pitted it, boxed it, and galleried
it, with those of any Bayes or Bilboa. Under George the First, the
monotonous smoothness of Byron’s versification and the terseness of his
expression would have made Pope himself envious.
As it was, he was the man of the last thirteen years of the eighteenth
century, and of the first twenty-three years of the nineteenth century.
He belonged half to the old, and half to the new school of poetry.
His personal taste led him to the former; his thirst of praise to the
latter; his talents were equally suited to both. His fame was a common
ground on which the zealots on both sides, Gifford for example, and
Shelley, might meet. He was the representative, not of either literary
party, but of both at once, and of their conflict, and of the victory
by which that conflict was terminated. His poetry fills and measures the
whole of the vast interval through which our literature has moved since
the time of Johnson. It touches the Essay on Man at the one extremity,
and the Excursion at the other.
There are several parallel instances in literary history. Voltaire,
for example, was the connecting link between the France of Lewis the
Fourteenth and the France of Lewis the Sixteenth, between Racine and
Boileau on the one side, and Condorcet and Beaumarchais on the other.
He, like Lord Byron, put himself at the head of an intellectual
revolution, dreading it all the time, murmuring at it, sneering at it,
yet choosing rather to move before his age in any direction than to be
left behind and forgotten. Dryden was the connecting link between the
literature of the age of James the First, and the literature of the age
of Anne. Oromasdes and Arimanes fought for him. Arimanes carried him
off. But his heart was to the last with Oromasdes. Lord Byron was,
in the same manner, the mediator between two generations, between two
hostile poetical sects. Though always sneering at Mr. Wordsworth, he
was yet, though perhaps unconsciously, the interpreter between Mr.
Wordsworth and the multitude. In the Lyrical Ballads and the Excursion
Mr. Wordsworth appeared as the high priest of a worship, of which nature
was the idol. No poems have ever indicated a more exquisite perception
of the beauty of the outer world or a more passionate love and reverence
for that beauty. Yet they were not popular; and it is not likely that
they ever will be popular as the poetry of Sir Walter Scott is popular.
The feeling which pervaded them was too deep for general sympathy. Their
style was often too mysterious for general comprehension. They made a
few esoteric disciples, and many scoffers. Lord Byron founded what
may be called an exoteric Lake school; and all the readers of verse in
England, we might say in Europe, hastened to sit at his feet. What Mr.
Wordsworth had said like a recluse, Lord Byron said like a man of the
world, with less profound feeling, but with more perspicuity, energy,
and conciseness. We would refer our readers to the last two cantos of
Childe Harold and to Manfred, in proof of these observations.
Lord Byron, like Mr. Wordsworth, had nothing dramatic in his genius. He
was indeed the reverse of a great dramatist, the very antithesis to a
great dramatist. All his characters, Harold looking on the sky, from
which his country and the sun are disappearing together, the Giaour
standing apart in the gloom of the side aisle, and casting a haggard
scowl from under his long hood at the crucifix and the censer, Conrad
leaning on his sword by the watch-tower, Lara smiling on the dancers,
Alp gazing steadily on the fatal cloud as it passes before the
moon, Manfred wandering among the precipices of Berne, Azzo on the
judgment-seat, Ugo at the bar, Lambro frowning on the siesta of his
daughter and Juan, Cain presenting his unacceptable offering, are
essentially the same. The varieties are varieties merely of age,
situation, and outward show. If ever Lord Byron attempted to exhibit men
of a different kind, he always made them either insipid or unnatural.
Selim is nothing. Bonnivart is nothing. Don Juan, in the first and best
cantos, is a feeble copy of the Page in the Marriage of Figaro. Johnson,
the man whom Juan meets in the slave-market, is a most striking failure.
How differently would Sir Walter Scott have drawn a bluff, fearless
Englishman, in such a situation! The portrait would have seemed to walk
out of the canvas.
Sardanapalus is more closely drawn than any dramatic personage that we
can remember. His heroism and his effeminacy, his contempt of death and
his dread of a weighty helmet, his kingly resolution to be seen in the
foremost ranks, and the anxiety with which he calls for a looking-glass
that he may be seen to advantage, are contrasted, it is true, with all
the point of Juvenal. Indeed the hint of the character seems to have
been taken from what Juvenal says of Otho:=
````“Speculum civilis sarcina belli.
```Nimirum summi ducis est occidere Galbam,
```Et curare cutem summi constantia civis,
```Bedriaci in campo spolium affectare Palati
```Et pressum in faciem digitis extendere panem.”=
These are excellent lines in a satire. But it is not the business of the
dramatist to exhibit characters in this sharp antithetical way. It
is not thus that Shakspeare makes Prince Hal rise from the rake of
Eastcheap into the hero of Shrewsbury, and sink again into the rake of
Eastcheap. It is not thus that Shakspeare has exhibited the union of
effeminacy and valour in Antony. A dramatist cannot commit a greater
error than that of following those pointed descriptions of character in
which satirists and historians indulge so much. It is by rejecting
what is natural that satirists and historians produce these striking
characters. Their great object generally is to ascribe to every man as
many contradictory qualities as possible: and this is an object easily
attained. By judicious selection and judicious exaggeration, the
intellect and the disposition of any human being might be described
as being made up of nothing but startling contrasts. If the dramatist
attempts to create a being answering to one of these descriptions, he
fails, because he reverses an imperfect analytical process. He produces,
not a man, but a personified epigram. Very eminent writers have fallen
into this snare. Ben Jonson has given us a Hermogenes, taken from the
lively lines of Horace; but the inconsistency which is so amusing in the
satire appears unnatural and disgusts us in the play. Sir Walter Scott
has committed a far more glaring error of the same kind in the novel of
Peveril. Admiring, as every judicious reader must admire, the keen and
vigorous lines in which Dryden satirised the Duke of Buckingham, Sir
Walter attempted to make a Duke of Buckingham to suit them, a real
living Zimri; and he made, not a man, but the most grotesque of all
monsters. A writer who should attempt to introduce into a play or a
novel such a Wharton as the Wharton of Pope, or a Lord Hervey answering
to Sporus, would fail in the same manner.
But to return to Lord Byron; his women, like his men, are all of one
breed. Haidee is a half-savage and girlish Julia; Julia is a civilised
and matronly Haidee. Leila is a wedded Zuleika, Zuleika a virgin Leila.
Gulnare and Medora appear to have been intentionally opposed to each
other. Yet the difference is a difference of situation only. A slight
change of circumstances would, it should seem, have sent Gulnare to the
lute of Medora, and armed Medora with the dagger of Gulnare.
It is hardly too much to say, that Lord Byron could exhibit only one man
and only one woman, a man, proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his
brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in
revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection: a woman all softness
and gentleness, loving to caress and to be caressed, but capable of
being transformed by passion into a tigress.
Even these two characters, his only two characters, he could not exhibit
dramatically. He exhibited them in the manner, not of Shakspeare, but of
Clarendon. He analysed them; he made them analyse themselves; but he did
not make them show themselves. We are told, for example, in many
lines of great force and spirit, that the speech of Lara was bitterly
sarcastic, that he talked little of his travels, that if he was much
questioned about them, his answers became short, and his brow gloomy.
But we have none of Lara’s sarcastic speeches or short answers. It is
not thus that the great masters of human nature have portrayed human
beings. Homer never tells us that Nestor loved to relate long stories
about his youth. Shakspeare never tells us that in the mind of Iago
everything that is beautiful and endearing was associated with some
filthy and debasing idea.
It is curious to observe the tendency which the dialogue of Lord Byron
always has to lose its character of a dialogue, and to become soliloquy.
The scenes between Manfred and the Chamois-hunter, between Manfred and
the Witch of the Alps, between Manfred and the Abbot, are instances of
this tendency. Manfred, after a few unimportant speeches, has all the
talk to himself. The other interlocutors are nothing more than good
listeners. They drop an occasional question or ejaculation which sets
Manfred off again on the inexhaustible topic of his personal feelings.
If we examine the fine passages in Lord Byron’s dramas, the description
of Rome, for example, in Manfred, the description of a Venetian revel in
Marino Faliero, the concluding invective which the old doge pronounces
against Venice, we shall find that there is nothing dramatic in these
speeches, that they derive none of their effect from the character or
situation of the speaker, and that they would have been as fine, or
finer, if they had been published as fragments of blank verse by Lord
Byron. There is scarcely a speech in Shakspeare of which the same could
be said. No skilful reader of the plays of Shakspeare can endure to see
what are called the fine things taken out, under the name of “Beauties,”
or of “Elegant Extracts,” or to hear any single passage, “To be or not
to be,” for example, quoted as a sample of the great poet. “To be or not
to be” has merit undoubtedly as a composition. It would have merit if
put into the mouth of a chorus. But its merit as a composition vanishes
when compared with its merit as belonging to Hamlet. It is not too
much to say that the great plays of Shakspeare would lose less by
being deprived of all the passages which are commonly called the fine
passages, than those passages lose by being read separately from
the play. This is perhaps the highest praise which can be given to a
dramatist.
On the other hand, it may be doubted whether there is, in all Lord
Byron’s plays, a single remarkable passage which owes any portion of its
interest or effect to its connection with the characters or the action.
He has written only one scene, as far as we can recollect, which
is dramatic even in manner--the scene between Lucifer and Cain. The
conference is animated, and each of the interlocutors has a fair share
of it. But this scene, when examined, will be found to be a confirmation
of our remarks. It is a dialogue only in form. It is a soliloquy in
essence. It is in reality a debate carried on within one single unquiet
and sceptical mind. The questions and the answers, the objections and
the solutions, all belong to the same character.
A writer who showed so little dramatic skill in works professedly
dramatic, was not likely to write narrative with dramatic effect.
Nothing could indeed be more rude and careless than the structure of
his narrative poems. He seems to have thought, with the hero of the
Rehearsal, that the plot was good for nothing but to bring in fine
things. His two longest works, Childe Harold and Don Juan, have no plan
whatever. Either of them might have been extended to any length, or cut
short at any point. The state in which the Giaour appears illustrates
the manner in which all Byron’s poems were constructed. They are all,
like the Giaour, collections of fragments; and, though there may be no
empty spaces marked by asterisks, it is still easy to perceive, by the
clumsiness of the joining, where the parts for the sake of which the
whole was composed end and begin.
It was in description and meditation that Byron excelled. “Description,”
as he said in Don Juan, “was his forte.” His manner is indeed peculiar,
and is almost unequalled; rapid, sketchy, full of vigour; the selection
happy, the strokes few and bold. In spite of the reverence which we feel
for the genius of Mr. Wordsworth we cannot but think that the minuteness
of his descriptions often diminishes their effect. He has accustomed
himself to gaze on nature with the eye of a lover, to dwell on every
feature, and to mark every change of aspect. Those beauties which strike
the most negligent observer, and those which only a close attention
discovers, are equally familiar to him and are equally prominent in
his poetry. The proverb of old Hesiod, that half is often more than the
whole, is eminently applicable to description. The policy of the Dutch,
who cut down most of the precious trees in the Spice Islands, in order
to raise the value of what remained, was a policy which poets would do
well to imitate. It was a policy which no poet understood better than
Lord Byron. Whatever his faults might be, he was never, while his mind
retained its vigour, accused of prolixity.
His descriptions, great as was their intrinsic merit, derived. their
principal interest from the feeling which always mingled with them.
He was himself the beginning, the middle, and the end, of all his own
poetry, the hero of every tale, the chief object in every landscape.
Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters, were universally
considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron; and there is every
reason to believe that he meant them to be so considered. The wonders of
the outer world, the Tagus, with the mighty fleets of England riding
on its bosom, the towers of Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest of
cork-trees and willows, the glaring marble of Pentelicus, the banks of
the Rhine, the glaciers of Clarens, the sweet Lake of Leman, the dell of
Egeria with its summer-birds and rustling lizards, the shapeless ruins
of Rome overgrown with ivy and wall-flowers, the stars, the sea, the
mountains, all were mere accessories, the background to one dark and
melancholy figure.
Never had any writer so vast a command of the whole eloquence of
scorn, misanthropy, and despair. That Marah was never dry. No art could
sweeten, no draughts could exhaust, its perennial waters of bitterness.
Never was there such variety in monotony as that of Byron. From maniac
laughter to piercing lamentation, there was not a single note of human
anguish of which he was not master. Year after year, and month after
month, he continued to repeat that to be wretched is the destiny of all;
that to be eminently wretched is the destiny of the eminent; that all
the desires by which we are cursed lead alike to misery, if they are not
gratified, to the misery of disappointment; if they are gratified, to
the misery of satiety. His heroes are men who have arrived by different
roads at the same goal of despair, who are sick of life, who are at
war with society, who are supported in their anguish only by an
unconquerable pride resembling that of Prometheus on the rock or of
Satan in the burning marl, who can master their agonies by the force
of their will, and who to the last defy the whole power of earth and
heaven. He always described himself as a man of the same kind with
his favourite creations, as a man whose heart had been withered, whose
capacity for happiness was gone and could not be restored, but whose
invincible spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or
hereafter.
How much of this morbid feeling sprang from an original disease of the
mind, how much from real misfortune, how much from the nervousness of
dissipation, how much was fanciful, how much was merely affected, it is
impossible for us, and would probably have been impossible for the most
intimate friends of Lord Byron, to decide. Whether there ever existed,
or can ever exist, a person answering to the description which he gave
of himself may be doubted; but that he was not such a person is beyond
all doubt. It is ridiculous to imagine that a man whose mind was really
imbued with scorn of his fellow-creatures would have published three or
four books every year in order to tell them so; or that a man who could
say with truth that he neither sought sympathy nor needed it would have
admitted all Europe to hear his farewell to his wife, and his blessings
on his child. In the second canto of Childe Harold, he tells us that he
is insensible to fame and obloquy:=
```“Ill may such contest now the spirit move,
```Which heeds nor keen reproof nor partial praise.”=
Yet we know on the best evidence that, a day or two before he
published these lines, he was greatly, indeed childishly, elated by the
compliments paid to his maiden speech in the House of Lords.
We are far, however, from thinking that his sadness was altogether
feigned. He was naturally a man of great sensibility; he had been
ill-educated; his feelings had been early exposed to sharp trials;
he had been crossed in his boyish love; he had been mortified by the
failure of his first literary efforts; he was straitened in pecuniary
circumstances; he was unfortunate in his domestic relations; the public
treated him with cruel injustice; his health and spirits suffered from
his dissipated habits of life; he was, on the whole, an unhappy man. He
early discovered that, by parading his unhappiness before the multitude,
he produced an immense sensation. The world gave him every encouragement
to talk about his mental sufferings. The interest which his first
confessions excited induced him to affect much that he did not feel; and
the affectation probably reacted on his feelings. How far the character
in which he exhibited himself was genuine, and how far theatrical, it
would probably have puzzled himself to say.
There can be no doubt that this remarkable man owed the vast influence
which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his
gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry. We never could very
clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation,
should be so popular in writing; or how it is that men who affect in
their compositions qualities and feelings which they have not, impose so
much more easily on their contemporaries than on posterity. The interest
which the loves of Petrarch excited in his own time, and the pitying
fondness with which half Europe looked upon Rousseau, are well known. To
readers of our age, the love of Petrarch seems to have been love of
that kind which breaks no hearts, and the sufferings of Rousseau to have
deserved laughter rather than pity, to have been partly counterfeited,
and partly the consequences of his own perverseness and vanity.
What our grandchildren may think of the character of Lord Byron, as
exhibited in his poetry, we will not pretend to guess. It is certain,
that the interest which he excited during his life is without a parallel
in literary history. The feeling with which young readers of poetry
regarded him can be conceived only by those who have experienced it. To
people who are unacquainted with real calamity, “nothing is so dainty
sweet as lovely melancholy.” This faint image of sorrow has in all
ages been considered by young gentlemen as an agreeable excitement. Old
gentlemen and middle-aged gentlemen have so many real causes of
sadness that they are rarely inclined “to be as sad as night only
for wantonness.” Indeed they want the power almost as much as the
inclination. We know very few persons engaged in active life, who, even
if they were to procure stools to be melancholy upon, and were to sit
down with all the premeditation of Master Stephen, would be able to
enjoy much of what somebody calls the “ecstasy of woe.”
Among that large class of young persons whose reading is almost entirely
confined to works of imagination, the popularity of Lord Byron was
unbounded. They bought pictures of him; they treasured up the smallest
relics of him; they learned his poems by heart, and did their best to
write like him, and to look like him. Many of them practised at the
glass in the hope of catching the curl of the upper lip, and the scowl
of the brow, which appear in some of his portraits. A few discarded
their neck-cloths in imitation of their great leader. For some years
the Minerva press sent forth no novel without a mysterious, unhappy,
Lara-like peer. The number of hopeful undergraduates and medical
students who became things of dark imaginings, on whom the freshness
of the heart ceased to fall like dew, whose passions had consumed
themselves to dust, and to whom the relief of tears was denied, passes
all calculation. This was not the worst. There was created in the minds
of many of these enthusiasts a pernicious and absurd association between
intellectual power and moral depravity. From the poetry of Lord
Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and
voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to
hate your neighbour, and to love your neighbour’s wife.
This affectation has passed away; and a few more years will destroy
whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the
name of Byron. To us he is still a man, young, noble, and unhappy. To
our children he will be merely a writer; and their impartial judgment
will appoint his place among writers; without regard to his rank or to
his private history. That his poetry will undergo a severe sifting, that
much of what has been admired by his contemporaries will be rejected as
worthless, we have little doubt. But we have as little doubt that, after
the closest scrutiny, there will still remain much that can only perish
with the English language.